I spent the first 2 weeks of November in Mozambique working on the continuation of the Youth Empowerment through Arts and Media project. This year, we are piloting digital mapping in addition to the other ICT tools that we’ve been integrating into the project. We weren’t able to find anyone locally in Mozambique who could train on Open Street Map but luckily were able to link up with Portuguese-speaking Iván Sánchez Ortega from OSM in Spain. (In case you didn’t catch the link – the official language in Mozambique is Portuguese…)
Iván was a great trainer and the youth from the two associations (Vuneka and Litanga) that we are working with really took to the idea of digital mapping and learning some new skills in the area of painting, theater, print journalism, radio, video and blogging. See some of Ivan’s thoughts on this Maps for Mozambique post.
Here are some photos of the work we did while in Mozambique….
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- Video training – this young woman took to video work amazingly fast. I was thoroughly impressed. She tended to her baby throughout the training and still managed to keep up with the rest.
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- We practiced digital mapping in Inhambane with Iván.
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- The arts group did a fantastic mural in the school yard that faces the busy street.
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- We met with community leaders to start mapping one sector of the Magaiça Community. Albertina sketched out on the ground where each group would go.
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- We split into 4 groups, each walking for over 2 hours, to map the perimeter of just one sector of Magaiça. (Things are really spread out here).
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- Albertina wasn’t quite sure why we couldn’t take any shortcuts and wanted to walk on every single path, but she was good sport. She eventually understood that we were tracking. She wanted to be sure that the community would get the map. “Lots of organizations come here but they don’t return.”
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- Albertina showed us a giant bees’ nest. Can we put that on an OSM map as a waypoint? It matters locally….
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- The ‘fuel tank’ on the little boat we used to cross from Inhambane to Maxixe to use the faster internet at the Plan Office. The scandal of the day was a girl on the boat, upon arriving to Inhambane, talking on her mobile and telling the person that she was in Maxixe. There was a general uproar on the boat and she was admonished and teased for using her mobile to lie to her man.
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- The guy on the left said he gets lost in Internet for hours, searching and learning. “I only go to school for the social part, I use the Internet for learning”
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- Working on a map.
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- Recruitment posters appeared on the Friday that we left. Interesting.
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- The fabulous team from Associations Litanga and Vuneka and the staff.
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